Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Articular cartilage cannot repair completely after injury. Scaffolds play a vital role in this process. Compound cartilage tissue constructed by tissue engineering method has become new research field of cartilage repair. Scaffold materials play an important role in the process of cartilage repair, and the choice of scaffold materials would influence the whole repair process.
OBJECTIVE: To fully understand advantages and disadvantages of cartilage tissue engineering scaffold material in order to guide the selection.
METHODS: The contents about cartilage tissue engineering scaffold material from CBM database, PubMed database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed), Wanfang database (http://www.wanfangdata.com.cn), and google academic network in November 2010 were retrieved by the first author with the key words of “cartilage, tissue engineering, scaffold materials, bone mesenchymal stem cell” om English and Chinese, respectively. The retrieval time was limited to 1990/2010. Duplicate researches were excluded.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Totally 1 185 articles were primarily selected according to reading title and abstract, the objective unrelated to this paper and repetitive 1 142 researches were excluded. A total of 43 documents were involved for summarization, finally 29 documents of them were included. Scaffolds used in tissue engineering, whether natural or synthetic, there are certain defects, such as too fast or too slow degradation in vivo, poor biocompatibility, and inflammation, The most important thing is cartilage tissue engineering is still a big gap from the clinical application. However, in the future tissue engineering scaffold material research is focused on improving existing materials and preparation process, developed composite materials, biomimetic materials, nano materials and modified natural materials.